Frigate passed by the fires, the wooden, glass, and stone equipment , and the odor of alcohol. He climbed up a bamboo ladder until he was on a platform placed against an area of stone from which lichen had not yet been removed. He reported to a foreman, who gave him a chert scraper. The foreman took from a rack a pine stick with Frigate's initials cut into it. It bore alternating horizontal and vertical lines, the former indicating the days he'd worked, the latter the number of months.
"Next year you'll be using a stick to scrape off the stuff," the foremen said. "We'll be saving the chert and flint for weapons."
Peter nodded and went to work.
In time, the supply of flint would be exhausted. Technology on The Riverworld would go backward. Instead of progressing from a wooden to a stone age, humanity would reverse the procedure.
Frigate wondered how he was going to get his flint-tipped weapons out of the state. If he sailed on Farrington' s craft he would, according to the law, have to leave his precious stones behind.
The time put in by Frigate on this work was estimated by the foreman. Except for the sun, there were few clocks of any type. The little glass available was used in the alcohol-making process, so there were not even hourglasses. For that matter, the sand used to make the glass had been imported from a state 800 kilometers down-River. That had cost Rumania several boatloads of tobacco and booze and piles of dragonfish and hornfish skins and bones. The tobacco and alcohol had been contributed by the citizens from their grails. Frigate had given up smoking and drinking for two months during this time of sacrifice. When it was over, he continued his abstinence from smoking, trading his cigarettes and cigars for whiskey. But, as had happened on Earth and here, he had slipped back into the arms of Demon Nicotine.
He worked hard, scraping off the thick green-blue plant growth from the black rock and stuffing it into the bamboo buckets. Others lowered the buckets on ropes to the ground, where their contents were dumped into vats.
Shortly before noon, he knocked off for the lunch hour. Before going down the ladders, he looked out over the hills. Far below, the white hull of the RazzleDazzle shone in the bright sun. Somehow, he was going to be on it when it up-anchored.
Peter walked back to the hut, noted that Eve wasn't there, and went on down to the plain. The line of interviewers did not look any shorter. He passed along the edge of the plain where its short grass abruptly stopped and the long grass of the hills began. What made for the line of demarcation? Were there chemicals in the hill soil that halted the encroachment of plain grass? Or was it vice versa? Or both? And why?
The archery range was about half a kilometer south of the dock area. He practiced shooting at a target of grass on a bamboo tripod for about thirty minutes. Then he went to the gymnasium area and ran sprints and made long jumps and engaged in judo, karate, and spear-fighting for two hours. At the end of the time, he was sweating and tired. But he was bursting with joy. It was wonderful to have a twenty-five-year-old body, the tiredness and feebleness of middle and old age gone, the aches and pains, the fat, the hernia, the ulcer, the headaches, the long-sightedness, all no more. Replacing it, the ability to run or swim swiftly and far, to feel sexual desire every night (and a good part of the day).
The worst thing he had done on Earth was to get a desk job as a technical writer at the age of thirty-eight and then at fifty-one, to become a fulltime fiction writer. He should have stayed in the steel mill. It was monotonous work, but while his body was handling the hot, heavy work, his mind-was busy dreaming up stories. At night he would read or write.
It was when he had started to sit on his butt all day that he had begun drinking so heavily. And his reading had diminished, too. It was too easy after working on a typewriter eight hours a day to sit in front of the TV all evening and swill Bourbon or Scotch. TV, the worst thing that had happened to the twentieth century. After the atom bomb and overpopulation, of course.
No, he told himself, that wasn't fair. He didn't have to be a boob before the tube. He could have used the self-discipline which enabled him to write to turn the set off except at highly selected times. But the lotus-eater syndrome had gotten him. Besides, there were programs on TV which were really excellent, both entertaining and educational.
Still, this world was good in that there were no TV's or automobiles or atom bombs or gross national production or paychecks or mortgages or medical bills. Or air or water pollution and almost no dust. And nobody gave a damn about communism or socialism or capitalism, because they didn't exist. Well, that was not quite true. Most states did have a sort of primitive communism.
31
He walked to the river and plunged in, cleaning off the sweat. Then he trotted along the bank (no huts allowed within 30 meters of it) to the dock area. He hung around until dinnertime, talking to friends. In between, he watched the two from the Razzle Dazzle. They were still interviewing, though lubricating their throats with frequent drinks. Wasn't that line ever going to end?
Just before it was suppertime, Farrington stood up and announced in a loud voice that he was taking no more applications. Those still in the line protested, but he said that he'd had enough.
By then the head of Ruritania, "Baron" Thomas Bullitt, had appeared with his councillors. Bullitt had had some small claim to fame in his day. In 1775 he had explored the Ohio River falls by the area which would become Louisville, Kentucky. Commissioned by the William and Mary College of Virginia, he surveyed the area. And thereafter disappeared from history. His aide-de-camp, Paulus Buys, a sixteenth-century Dutchman, was with him. Both invited the crew of the Razzle Dazzle to a parry in their honor that night. The main reason for the invitation was to hear the adventures of the crew. River-dwellers loved gossip and exciting tales, since their fields of entertainment were limited.
Farrington accepted, but said that six of the crew would have to stay on the ship as guards. Frigate followed the crowd to a large roofed-over area, the Town Hall. Torches and bonfires drove back the darkness, and an orchestra played while the local variety of square-dancing began. Frisco and Tex stood around for a while, talking to the chief statesmen and their wives and close friends. Frigate, as one of the hoi polloi, was not admitted to the sacred circle. He knew, however, that the event would become much less formal later on. While he was standing in line to get the free liter of pure alcohol allowed per person at such functions, he was joined by his hutmate.
Eve Bellington waved at him and then got into line twelve persons behind him. She was tall, full figured, black haired, blue. eyed, a Georgia peach. Born 1850, died two days before her one hundred first birthday. Her father was a wealthy cotton planter with a distinguished record as a major in the Confederate cavalry. The Bellington plantation was burned down during Sherman's march through Georgia, and the Bellingtons had become penniless. Her father had then gone to California and found enough gold to buy a partnership in a shipping firm.
Eve had loved being wealthy again, but she still had not forgiven him for leaving her mother and herself to struggle through the occupation and the early years of Reconstruction.
During her father's absence, Eve and her mother had lived with her father's brother, a handsome man only ten years older than Eve. He had raped her (without too much resistance, Eve admitted) when she was fifteen. When her mother had found that her daughter was pregnant, she had shot the uncle in the legs and the genitals. He survived a few years as a crippled eunuch in prison.